the life of faith

LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON

L A K E F A M I L Y I N S T I T U T E O N F A I T H & G I V I N G

A N D

the faithful useof possessions

the life of faith and

the faithful use of possessions

the life of faith and

the faithful use of possessions

Luke Timothy Johnson

The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana UniversityIndiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

© 2006 by Luke Timothy Johnson

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Foreword

The occasion of the third annual Thomas H. Lake Lecture, delivered by New

Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson, was just one demonstration of the

growth and development of the Lake Family Institute on Faith & Giving. This

past year, Professor William Jackson of the Department of Religious Studies at

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis became the first Lake Scholar.

During his three-year term, he will develop a course on religion and philanthropy

and complete an anthology on giving, which will contain selections from literature,

news stories, folk tales, and essays, reflecting views on philanthropy during the

course of American history. Richard Klopp, a student in the Ph.D. in Philanthropic

Studies program, was appointed as a research assistant in the Lake Family Institute.

The director of the Institute, Reverend William Enright, and his colleague Lauren

Wright conducted more than thirty lectures and workshops related to faith and

philanthropy in 2005. Mark Chaves of the sociology department at the University

of Arizona and Joseph Cook, former chairman of Amylin Pharmaceuticals, were in

residence as Distinguished Visitors to the Institute. Cook addressed the Economic

Club of Indianapolis on the topic of faith and philanthropy in the corporate

world—integrating economic work with a sense of duty to others. And Luke

Timothy Johnson, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian

Origins at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, delivered the third

distinguished Thomas H. Lake Lecture entitled, “The Life of Faith and the Faithful

Use of Possessions.”

Luke Timothy Johnson’s lecture challenges us to think carefully about

the relationship between faith, especially in scriptural terms, and philanthropy,

or how we share our possessions. In some ways, he raises perplexing questions

instead of providing easy answers. You will find in the text of his lecture much

for contemplation and discussion. He challenges us to think of discernment—how

spiritual values shape personal philanthropy and influence giving—as an outward-

looking rather than an inward-looking process. He calls for personal contact in

philanthropy, which fosters the patterns of volunteerism and donor engagement

that many of us practice, but which also alters the anonymity called for in the

Code of Maimonides and raises ethical questions about the relationship between

donors and recipients. We hope this lecture stimulates conversation among scholars

and practitioners interested in the relationship between faith and giving and

between religion and philanthropy.

We at the Center on Philanthropy are grateful to the family of Thomas

H. Lake for their foresight in establishing the Lake Family Institute on Faith &

Giving at the Center on Philanthropy. The Center has always known that religion

is an important aspect of total philanthropic giving and voluntary action. The

discipline of philanthropic studies has always included religious studies. The largest

share of philanthropy in the United States goes to religious causes as does the

majority of household giving. According to the Center on Philanthropy Panel Study

(COPPS),* 58 percent of Americans who are involved with philanthropy indicate

that their initial motivation was based in religious belief. Scholars have long seen

a relationship between religion and philanthropy. But data from COPPS indicate

that the relationship between religion and philanthropy, between faith and giving,

is more complex than we first thought. We are grateful to have the Lake Family

Institute as a partner in helping us understand these complexities. And we are

especially grateful for scholars like Luke Timothy Johnson who make contributions

toward that understanding.

Eugene R. Tempel

Executive Director

The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University

June 2006

* The Center on Philanthropy Panel Study (COPPS) is a research project that aims to follow the same families’ philanthropic behaviors throughout their lives. COPPS is conducted in conjunction with the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has surveyed the same 5,000 households since 1966.

The importance of any topic can be assessed by how much it is talked about.

By this measure, the topic of material possessions—money and the stuff it buys

and the boxes we keep the stuff in—is obviously important. Politicians know that

nothing so galvanizes the electorate as tax breaks or Social Security reform or disaster

relief management (“It’s the economy, stupid.”). Married couples know that

money—and sex—are the subjects on which spouses most often disagree and

frequently divide. Churches sometimes seem to talk about little other than material

possessions, whipsawing congregants between stewardship appeals and charity

appeals. Televangelists talk about money all the time, offering the assurance that

seed money for this particular satellite ministry will yield a harvest of personal

prosperity. And Scripture certainly speaks more often and emphatically about the

right and wrong uses of possessions than about the right and wrong way to have sex.

The difficulty of any topic can also be assessed by how unhelpful much

of the talk about it is. Political discourse is careless and ideologically driven, with

terms like “the rich” and “the poor” and “the middle class” being used both

loosely and with every intention to distort. Political and religious talk alike seldom

touch the actual human experience either of gain or loss. The true devastation

worked by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward had more to do with

the loss of place and friends and sharing red beans and rice on Monday than it

did with the monetary value of houses and cars. In the opposite direction, we

seldom talk about the new forms of economic slavery experienced by high-income

and high-consumption dual-career suburban families with two fast-track jobs,

two SUVs and two children at soccer camp. As for Scripture’s frequent directions

concerning possessions, they are so bewilderingly diverse and even contradictory

that virtually any practice with respect to money and the stuff it buys and the

boxes for storing the stuff can find Biblical support somewhere.

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When we seriously ask what we are to do with our stuff, or how our faith

in God should lead us to a faithful use of our possessions, we seldom find much

clarity. Most of us muddle through a miasma of concern and confusion and guilt.

We are concerned: we want to do the right thing. But we are confused: if we send

relief for Katrina victims, can we help the earthquake victims in Pakistan as well,

and if we do either can we buy the kids shoes? And, we feel guilty, for the needs

and the pleas keep coming, and we literally do not know either how to think or

feel or act in a way that makes sense to our faith.

My purpose in this lecture is to improve talk about possessions by

modeling a way of thinking about the topic that betrays neither the witness of

Scripture nor the witness of real human lives. I surely will not provide an answer

to the question, “What should we do?” for I consider that question impossible

to answer once and for all. Rather, I propose a way of thinking theologically that

may provide a framework for the discernment of faith with respect to money

and the stuff it buys and the boxes we put that stuff in. If the discussion is itself

to be faithful to Scripture and life, it must begin with the specific, rather than the

general, and allow a question to build slowly without rushing to a bad answer to

an ill-understood question. So I begin with the story of the widow’s mite (Luke

20:45–21:6; Mark 12:38–13:2), which is small and specific, indeed!

In Luke’s Gospel as in Mark’s, Jesus’ saying about the widow concludes a

series of disputations between him and various Jewish leaders in the temple precincts:

And in the hearing of all the people he said to his disciples, “Beware of the scribes, who like to go about in long robes, and love salutationsin the market places and the best seats in synagogues and the places ofhonor at feasts, who devour widows’ houses and for a pretense makelong prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.” He lookedup and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury; and he saw apoor widow put in two copper coins. And he said, “Truly I tell you,this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for they all contri-buted out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all theliving she had.” And as some spoke of the temple, how it was adornedwith noble stones and offerings, he said, “As for these things whichyou see, the days will come when there shall not be left here one stoneupon another that shall not be thrown down.”

You notice that I quoted the passage about the widow in its immediate

literary context. Jesus comments on three situations that come to his attention.

All three situations involve the use of possessions. Cumulatively, Jesus’ declarations

challenge rather than reassure.

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The harshness of the first and last statements, directed, in turn, against the

scribes and the adornments of the temple, can still make us squirm. Those “noble

stones and offerings” that Jesus includes in his summary prediction of the temple’s

destruction are, after all, precisely the ancient Jewish equivalent of endowed

buildings with memorial plaques praising the benefactions of pious donors, the

visible evidence of noble philanthropy. And the ancient scribes with their religious

garb and public posturing were not so different from contemporary examples of

preachers “swallowing the houses of widows” for their self-aggrandizing projects.

The more we ponder the middle saying, however, the more difficult it

appears. It has a double contrast: between the wealthy and the destitute widow on

one hand; between the gifts of the rich given out of their excess and the gift of the

widow out of her neediness on the other. The widow is said to have given “more

than all the rest,” not because of the size of her gift but because of its more radical

character: by donating two of the smallest coins in circulation, she was giving away

“all her life (bios),” that is, all that supported her marginal existence. The wealthy

could give greater amounts but with less impact on themselves. The measure of

giving, it appears, is here less the product than the cost. Well, this is hard enough,

but not yet really confusing.

What does get confusing is the setting for the contrast. That “treasury”

in the temple was, as we learn from rabbinic literature, the so-called “chamber

of secrets.” Before the destruction of the temple, it was the method used to fulfill

the demands of Torah for the collection of alms for those perennially dispossessed

in a land-based economy in a patriarchal society, namely widows, orphans, and

sojourners. Knowing this historical fact makes Jesus’ saying more complex and

challenging. The wealthy depositing their gifts in the chamber of secrets are

certainly not to be equated with the scribes devouring the houses of widows; nor

are they making contributions to the adornments of the temple wall that might

bear their name; they are, in fact, seeking to fulfill the covenantal demands of

caring for widows and orphans. They are contributing precisely to persons such as

the widow. They do so indirectly and institutionally, rather than directly, yet there

is no hint that Jesus condemns these rich folk who are making contributions. They

simply are not giving as much as the widow does.

Some things in this scriptural passage are clear: Jesus unambiguously

denounces gaining wealth by oppression and fraud. More subtly, he criticizes

ostentatious donation for purposes of self-memorializing. But when it comes to the

question of how possessions are to be used faithfully as an expression of our faith,

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the passage about the rich people and the widow is far less helpful. Jesus speaks

with authority, but what is he saying to us?

For that question to be authentic, we need to introduce another sort of

text, that of human experience. When we lift our eyes from the demanding but

puzzling words of the Gospel to the lives of our fellow humans on the planet,

we encounter a text equally absolute in moral force but also equally deficient in

clear direction. Each of us can easily catalogue the disasters known to us either

through first-hand experience or observation or through the news media: in our

country the homeless and impoverished and jobless, the undereducated and over-

stimulated, the narcotized and the marginalized; abroad, the truly appalling masses

of destitute, whether periodically as in Eastern Europe or chronically, as in India

and Pakistan; whether at the edges of utter extinction as in the Sudan and Somalia

or at the nagging edge of modernity, as in Latin America. The lists make us flinch

and recoil. How can we gaze on the face of such endless need and such ceaseless

suffering? The text of our experience also calls out to us, “Do something, you

must do something!”

But what are we to do? The easiest answers are the simple answers. We

can leave all our possessions and join the poor. This relieves our conscience but

also makes us dependent on someone with less passion but steadier work. We can

gather all our energy for the reform of social and economic systems that we see

as encouraging or requiring greed and oppression. But that option also, in light

of evidence concerning the condition of people under socialist regimes, seems

less attractive even if it were feasible. Should people of faith then simply conform

themselves to the acquisitive compulsions of contemporary American culture? No

more than the text of Scripture does the text of our lives provide a clear mandate

for the use of our possessions.

We shall make no progress at all if we do not acknowledge that such

uncertainty is inevitable. Matters that cut so close to the bone of our individual

and communal sense of identity as being and having, that demand our using

language so slippery as that attaching to words such as rich and poor, that

inevitably involve not only our minds but also our tangled emotions of longing and

desire and fear and regret, that call into question, finally, even the condition of our

fragile physical existence—in such matters any position that purports to be simple

or straightforward is, by that fact, recognizable as inadequate.

When we discuss possessions or power or sexuality, we also find it

impossible to disentangle ourselves from our own messy stories. We cannot,

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without distortion, distance ourselves from such subjects. We cannot pretend

that we have no stake in the analysis. We each bring to such discussions our own

tangled tale of hope and disappointment, of fear and longing. This is not reason for

despair. Just the opposite: our discussion is enriched and enlivened by the multiple

perspectives that each of us brings to it. If our discussion thereby becomes more

complex and murky, then we are closer to the truth, for the truth is that we are

all involved in a mystery (of existence and non-existence, of being and having) as

resistant and complex and murky as our very bodies. Our subject touches on the

truth of our somatic/spiritual existence.

Like everyone else, I bring my own past and my own perplexities to the topic

of faith and the faithful use of possessions. I was the sixth and final child of a widow

who lived in the economically depressed area of northern Wisconsin. She struggled

to clothe and feed her children. Yet she taught them the beauty of music and poetry,

teaching them also thereby that the terms poverty and wealth are not only relative

but also bear qualitative as well as quantitative dimensions. For some fifteen years I

lived within the context of Benedictine monasticism. I found the security offered by

a community of possessions a definite step up economically. But I also discovered

that renouncing possessions by vow does not remove the vice of acquisitiveness, but

only transfers it to other realms. At twenty-eight, I married a woman with six chil-

dren who had been married to a wealthy entrepreneur. She left a life of luxury for

the sake of her children and partnered a literally penniless graduate student in New

Testament studies with, at best, dubious prospects. From Joy I learned that freedom and

dignity and respect are more precious than grand homes and countless dollars. As

a junior professor at Yale, I learned that genteel poverty is a euphemism for grinding

effort wedded to anxiety. I learned that the monastic life looked attractive from the

perspective of struggling to meet massive medical bills on a less than living wage.

My ten years at Indiana University taught me the peculiar bitterness of

spirit that can be generated by envy of endowed and funded colleagues in the

sciences from the perspective of a lowly humanities professor. And now for

fourteen years at Emory University, I have embarrassingly found myself in precisely

one of those endowed chairs in a wealthy institution in the city of Atlanta, where

ostentatious wealth and privilege sit side by side with neighborhoods so desolate

and depressed that passage through them brings tears. And I have no idea what

lesson I am now learning.

I do not burden you with this recital because I think it is particularly

edifying. Just the opposite: It is to assure you that I occupy no privileged vantage

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point for speaking about the mystery of possessions and to invite you to bring your

own stories as well into your reflection. But I have also shared some of my story in

order to help you see the kinds of questions I brought (or which brought me) to my

own theological engagement with the texts of Scripture.

My original ambitions for my Ph.D. dissertation were grandiose: I wanted to

compare the ways in which group ideologies and community practices reinforced

each other in representative communities in the Hellenistic world, with special

reference to the use of possessions (the monastic influence was obvious to everyone

but me). But trying to figure out what was happening in a single New Testament

writing, Luke-Acts,1 took up the whole study. The fascinating thing about Luke’s

two-volume work was that it consistently spoke about possessions, but did not

speak about possessions consistently. The more I examined Luke’s possessions

language, the clearer it seemed that possessions language served a literary function

within his narrative.2

Luke uses the states of rich and poor and the disposition of possessions

as symbols for modes of response to God’s visitation in history through God’s

prophets. Throughout his story, those who reject the call of God are rich, lovers of

money, and acquisitive. Those who accept God’s call are the poor, who are willing

to leave their possessions and share them with others. The two stories in Acts

4:32–5:11 perfectly exemplify the two responses to God: those sharing spiritual

unity signified it by laying their possessions at the feet of the apostles and enjoyed

the blessings of the messianic age; but the couple Ananias and Sapphira, who broke

spiritual unity by conspiring together and expressed that disunity by holding back

a portion of their possessions, ended up dead at the feet of the apostle. Luke’s

interest, I concluded, was not first of all in possessions, but in the human response

to God in obedient faith. But he found in possessions language a symbol that could

express relationships of power and of human self-disposition.

Given the limits of dissertations, I was unable to pursue the theological

implications of my literary analysis until I wrote Sharing Possessions: Mandate

and Symbol of Faith.3 Now I was able to seek out the connections between the

life of faith and the faithful use of possessions. I began with a modest phenome-

nology of the mystery of human possessing, discovering not only how profoundly

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1 Luke-Acts is the scholarly abbreviation (since ca. 1927) of the books that appear in the New Testament as The Gospel of Luke and The Acts of the Apostles but which were undoubtedly written as a single literary composition.2 The Literary Function of Possessions in Luke-Acts, Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series (Mis-soula: Scholars Press, 1977).3 In the series, Overtures to Biblical Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981).

ambiguous was our ordinary language about possessions, but also how inevitably

and irreducibly paradoxical was the actual claim to “have” by creatures who

cannot even account for their very “being.”4

Chastened by these preliminary reflections, I turned again to Luke-Acts,

this time not to discover the literary tropes concerning possessions, but rather in

the search for a mandate to guide human practice. What I found, once more, was

that Luke-Acts actually contained too many and too-irreconcilable commands

concerning possessions, forcing the reader who takes the text seriously as a guide

to life toward one of several hermeneutical strategies.

Reading Luke-Acts, we could conclude that only those economically

poor are really part of God’s kingdom, and on that basis would take literally the

command to leave all possessions to follow Jesus. If we did that, however, we

would not be able to fulfill another, equally serious, commandment, namely to

give alms to the poor. Nor could we give alms if we followed another apparent

prescription, that Christians join all their possessions in a community of goods.

The mandates appear to cancel each other out.

In the face of such diversity of mandate, Christians have usually selected

one as normative and relegated the others to the level of advice or counsel. They

became mendicants, monks or philanthropists and quietly suppressed the thought

that their obedience to Jesus’ commands was at best partial. The approach I

took was to expand the inquiry to the whole of the Bible. I suspected that the

“consistent inconsistency” of Luke-Acts was not peculiar to that writing but was

a more pervasive feature of Scripture. My guess proved correct. Luke-Acts is in

no way distinctive. In every way, the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings directly

connect the use of possessions to the covenantal faith in the One God. Faith in

God demands certain ways of using possessions; the opposite of such faith, called

idolatry, leads to quite divergent uses of possessions. The other New Testament

writings make the same link between monotheistic faith and the proper use of

possessions, between idolatry and the misuse of possessions.

Of far greater importance than the Bible’s variety of specific commands

concerning possessions, I concluded, is the premise underlying all the commands,

that the sharing of possessions is both the mandate and the symbol of faith. It is

the mandate of faith in God, because such faith sees all that we are and have as

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4 All of my work in this area has been fundamentally indebted to Gabriel Marcel: Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), The Mystery of Being (London: Harvill Press, 1950-51), and Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).

always and irreducibly gifts, given at every moment and never completely in our

control. And since faith sees our selves as gifted, at once always full and always

empty, the logic of faith is to share that gift with others.

Idolatry, in contrast, which refuses to acknowledge that we are gifted, but

seeks to establish our existence and worth on the basis of our own efforts, must

logically use possessions as a means of asserting both: we are what we have. The

more we have, the more we are; the less we have, the less we are. The logic of

idolatry is therefore envy and competition leading to mutual elimination, since if

life is a zero-sum game, it is necessary that if one has more, another has less.

In its negative form, the mandate of faith is clear and consistent. Faith

forbids all acquisitiveness and greed and envy as intrinsically the expression of

idolatry. Therefore, all of Scripture consistently and emphatically forbids stealing

and fraud and oppression and perverting of justice and moving of landmarks and

withholding of wages and neglecting of widows and orphans and sojourners.

In contrast, the mandate for the positive sharing of possessions is far more

various. It was this side of the issue that most intrigued me. Why so definite on one

side yet so vague on the other? One reason could be the notorious difficulty with all

positive commandments. Negative commands are easier to spell out and to observe,

for they exclude a specific form of behavior but allow all others. Positive commands,

because they are open-ended, tend to be difficult both to define and execute. Think

of, “Do not kill,” which leaves open all the positive ways of giving life, and then,

“Love your neighbor as yourself,” which gives rise to anxious perfectionism.

But I think that something more is at work in this case. The vagueness and

open-endedness of the mandate “share possessions” is connected directly to the

open-ended character of faith in the Living God. God moves ahead of us all in

the circumstances of our lives and calls us to respond in those specific and ever-

changing circumstances. In the last book I devoted to this subject, I tried to analyze

more closely this pattern of faithful obedience as a kind of constant oscillation

between idolatry and faith, closure and openness.5

Our every instinct as humans is toward idolatry, to close and protect our

own projects and possessions. But God calls us to a larger and more frightening

space, God’s own creation, revealed to us in the others we encounter every day.

When we obey the call to faith, to an openness to God as disclosed through God’s

creation, and let go for the moment of our projects and possessions by which we

want to define ourselves, we experience both the thrill and terror of freedom.

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5 Faith’s Freedom: A Classic Spirituality for Contemporary Christians (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990).

Yet, characteristically, no sooner do we enter into that open space than we

begin to fence it in and furnish it according to our tastes, turning God’s call and

gift into our project and possession. As you might surmise from this brief sketch, I

have begun to think of Luther’s simul justus et peccator (at the same time righteous

and a sinner) in terms of a dynamic process. It is not as though we remain statically

in one place, yet God by decree justifies us anyway. Rather, by gift we are enabled

to grow toward God. The gift we call grace is always from God’s side, through

the intrusive interruptions of our projects by others; on our side, we constantly

try to fit that gift into a frame we can control. If we attended only to our tendency

toward idolatry, we would despair. Our hope is that our faith is in the Living God

who can constantly gift us through others because God remains the constantly

surprising Other, beyond our control.

Between faith professed and faith enacted, therefore, lies discernment.

God’s call comes to us in constantly changing circumstances, which resist

prediction or control. For faith to be truly obedient (that is, creatively loyal to

the One calling), then it must discern in the constantly altering face of real life the

appropriate way for faith to respond.6 This is the perilous and terrifying freedom

of faith: we never know whether our specific choice is “right” but can only trust

that our way of choosing is “righteous.”

What this means for the faithful disposition of possessions is, I think, clear.

The mandate of faith is, in the most proper sense, to symbolize faith. Faith needs to

be embodied in ever-changing ways in response to the call of God. That embodied

response in physical action, and specifically the disposition of possessions, is not

“symbolic” in some weakened sense of the term, but in its fullest, sacramental,

sense: it effects what it signifies. Acquisitiveness, greed, oppression: these all

obviously symbolize the response of idolatry. But every open-handed sharing of

possessions equally enacts the very essence of faith. It is in this respect that the

obediential faith of Jesus, which expressed itself in a complete receptivity to the

call of God in every circumstance and in the self-emptying service to his neighbor

at every moment, can be seen as the Christological exemplar for the sharing of

possessions. As Paul tells the Corinthians when trying to persuade them to join in

his great collection of money for the poor in Jerusalem: “You know the gift of our

Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so

that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9).

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6 See G. Marcel, Creative Fidelity, translated by R. Rosthal (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1964).

It was in light of this understanding of sharing possessions as the symbol of

faith that I attempted in the final chapter of my book Sharing Possessions to assess

two formal attempts to structure the positive sharing of possessions, namely the

ideal of a community of goods which has always tempted the Christian tradition

and the Jewish practice of community almsgiving. My assessment relied completely

on which model of sharing best symbolized the essential movement of faith as

obedience to the Living God. Reciting the details of that analysis would be tedious.

But I concluded that Christians would do well to abandon the first ideal and learn

something from the second. This is one among many things that we can learn from

the Jewish tradition.

I want to devote the final portion of this lecture to a series of propositions

(or even theses) concerning faith and the faithful use of possessions.

• As spiritual/somatic creatures, we are inevitably caught in the paradoxical condition of being and having; we truly have no choice as to whether we are to “possess,” but only what we are to possess and how we are to use our possessions.

• The way we dispose of our possessions is the symbol of our spiritual commitments, just as the disposition of our bodies enacts the desires of our heart.

• Our “possessions” encompass far more than material things. They include our time, space, ideas, dreams, emotions, projects, virtue, spiritual status, whatever we might claim as “mine” or “ours.”

• The Living God we encounter as the Other, as we meet all those who are the “others” in our lives, calls us out of the captivity of idolatry into the gift of freedom, where we can neither own nor control, but are rather caught up in a perilous and liberating power not our own.

• Our idolatrous impulse to self-determination, expressed by our identifying our being with our having, is potentiated into sin by our refusal of that call, expressed by an absolute claim to our possessions and those of others.

• Obediential faith in the Living God means in effect relinquishing our absolute hold on what is “ours”—whether money or time or space or ideas or reputation or self-image or even our notions of what faith demands—and allowing these “possessions” to be relativized by God's project.

• The specific way in which this obediential faith in God is enacted is in our response to those “others” we encounter in our lives and in the ways their needs, projects, desires and demands intersect and thereby relativize our own.

• The response of faith is never once and for all, but is a lifelong series of responses to a God who constantly moves ahead of us. Therefore, it

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is contrary to the nature of obedient faith to expect a single, once-for-all disposition of our “possessions” that need never be challenged or changed.

• Although that mandate of faith which forbids the idolatrous clinging to possessions deriving from envy, fear, compulsion, greed and covetousness is absolute, the symbolization of faith in the positive sharing of possessions must always remain relative to the character of the circumstances in which God calls. To be precise, the mandate itself is absolute, but the mode of its enactment is relative to circumstances.

• The role of discernment in the faithful disposition of possessions is critical, for if such sharing is to be determined, not by our projects, but by the needs of others, then those needs must be properly assessed, in qualitative as well as in quantitative terms. Only spiritual discernment can make faith truly obedient, which is to say, truly creative, flexible, and open to the One who calls.

• The sharing of possessions that is the symbolization of living faith must always maintain some genuine face-to-face and personal contact with those with whom possessions are being shared. Otherwise, the sharing simply becomes a rigid program to which we are committed and may no longer respond to the real needs of those we are serving. This applies as well, of course, to such sharing of spiritual possessions as teaching and preaching. The teacher who has no office hours and does not learn the stories of students is alienated from the faithful sharing of intellectual possessions; the preacher who does no pastoral counseling and therefore does not hear the stories of parishioners is alienated from the faithful sharing of spiritual possessions.

• Since as embodied creatures we are also thereby inevitably social creatures, the way we gather ourselves socially into intentional communities has the same symbolic significance as it does for individuals. For Christians, this means that the faithful sharing of possessions is not simply a matter of individual faith but must express the faith of the community as well.

• What was said in the previous points about the faith of the individual therefore applies as well to the church as a community of faith: It has no choice concerning whether it possesses, but only how much it possesses and how it uses those possessions. Likewise with the other points: the church's possessions include not just financial resources, but also intellectual and spiritual resources; the call of faith demands on the negative side the refusal to define identity on the basis of possessions or their acquiring, and on the positive side faith demands the sharing of all possessions. The modes of sharing are determined by the discernment of the community, and such discernment focuses not of the self-image of the church but on the needs of others, demanding therefore a constant attention and face-to-face engagement with those others.

• What most distinguishes the faithful sharing of possessions by a church community from the faithful sharing by individual believers

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is the relative complexity of life together: decisions must be made, organization is required. This means on one hand that spontaneity is lessened. On the other hand, it makes the constant practice of discernment and personal knowledge of those being served all the more necessary, for the inertia of community self-serving is a more constant danger.

I have tried to suggest some of the elements that I think must go into any

theological reflection: the careful consideration of the normative texts by which we

live, and an equal attention to the circumstances and experiences of human life. By

allowing these texts to speak to each other, we discover even more complexity but

also certain simple principles that might guide our thinking and our action.

Such principles are themselves, of course, far too broad to constitute a

definite program of action, especially one that we could institute and then forget.

And that may be the most important conviction I want to share. The one thing we

most want is to be able to organize our life so that it does not require our presence;

we want an answer in our pocket as a possession, so that we can have the comfort

and security that we are “doing the right thing.”

We do not want to have to constantly review our projects, have them

challenged; we hate and detest discernment. Here is where our desire and God's

seem to conflict, for apparently our comfort and security in being right is low on

God's agenda. In one of Scripture’s most dramatic passages, the Prophet Micah

proposes a number of once-for-all projects that might please God: “With what

shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come

before Him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased

with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first

born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” Then the

prophet answers, “He has showed you, humans, what is good; and what does the

Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly

with your God?” (Mic. 6:6-8) God, it seems, does not require a present, but our

presence, which is the only gift that is distinctively ours to give to God by giving it

each moment to each other.

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Dr. Luke Timothy Johnson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament

and Christian Origins at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University.

A Roman Catholic, Dr. Johnson was for a considerable time a Benedictine monk

and priest before becoming a Biblical scholar. He remains a lay person in the

Roman Catholic community. After having completed his Master of Divinity degree

at St. Meinrad School of Theology, St. Meinrad, Indiana, as well as an M.A. in

Religious Studies at Indiana University in 1970, he began Ph.D. work in New

Testament Studies at Yale University. He completed his Ph.D. in 1976, and his

dissertation, The Literary Function of Possessions in Luke–Acts, was published

by Scholars Press in 1977. Dr. Johnson taught New Testament at Yale Divinity

School as assistant and then associate professor from 1976 to 1982. He then

became Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Indiana University,

Bloomington, Indiana, where he continued to teach from 1982 until accepting his

present position in 1992. Dr. Johnson has written a large introduction to the New

Testament writings called The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation,

now in its second edition, which is widely used in both colleges and seminaries.

In addition, he has written a number of scholarly books, including his two-volume

commentary on Luke-Acts for the Sacra Pagina series from Liturgical Press (1991

and 1992) and commentaries on James and the Pastorals for the Anchor Bible

(1995 and 1999). He has also written a number of books and articles for the

Church, including Sharing Possessions: Mandate and Symbol of Faith (1981),

Faith’s Freedom: A Classic Spirituality for Contemporary Christians (1990),

and Scripture and Discernment: Decision-Making in the Church (1996). He has

written on the person of Jesus in two widely discussed books, The Real Jesus: The

Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels

(1996), and Living Jesus: Learning the Heart of the Gospel (1998).

The Center on Philanthropy’s Lake Family Institute on Faith & Giving is dedicated to helping people of faith, regardless of their religious persuasion, think creatively and reflectively on the relationship between their faith and their giving. The Institute engages in research, provides resources that will educate and help people better understand giving as a reflection of their faith, and creates venues for civic conversation on this subject.

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The Lake Family Institute on Faith & Giving honors the legacy of Thomas and Marjorie Lake. Thomas H. Lake served as president and chairman of the Lilly Endowment Inc. for more than 20 years, accepting that leadership role after 30 years at Eli Lilly & Company, following his retirement as president of the company. The Lake Family Institute honors Mr. and Mrs. Lake and their many contributions through leadership in philanthropy.